Monday, December 25, 2017

Throughout the millennia, next to the
Mjolnir or the Valknut, the Irminsul has taken a primary position
among the most significant Germanic Heathen symbols. Though it is not
a Rune, many Runers are aware of it, and even a bit of its mysterious
history. And in a few spots – particularly in Germany and Austria -
it has generally supplanted the Mjolnir as a native pagan symbol, at
least since the time of Guido von List.

Irminsul

Mjolnir, the Hammer of Thor

This advancement is more than a stylish
decision: as it were, we can say that the symbol of life and
strength, the Irminsul, is starting to supplant the symbol of battle,
the war hammer. Does that imply that the Northern Tradition has
moved to a phase of transcendent consciousness
and that Heidevolk don’t need to battle as much as before? Perhaps,
and perhaps not. What is more likely, is that we are now in a process of re-discovering a symbol that was largely obscured for many years, and that the various spiritual paths known as Asatru, Odinism, Forn sed and so on, actually had many more major symbols than just the Mjolnir - only in recent times has the Mjolnir become so over-emphasized in the popular imagination (and it is far from the only "warrior symbol" in Germanic Heathenry). The renewed interest in the Irminsul is really a renewed interest in the mysteries of the Odinic path, as it is generally seen as an Odinic, rather
than Thoric, symbol, and thus has more esoteric and initiatic
meanings – something that is not as easy to proscribe as a
militaristic cultural resurgence against the modern morass of
atomized consumerism.

In this season of Yul-Tag, which has
been co-opted by a herder Church and more recently by consumerism, we
may well ask for guidance and a return of the Irminsul to
center-stage in the festivals of mid-winter as it was in the times of
Old. Far better for Irminsul to be the center focus, than piles of
plastic debt. Gifts to family in the times of Irmin's Rites, were
simple and thoughtful. How low our world has been brought, that now
this season has become for so many wayward children, a time of
arrogance, petty materialistic squabbles, baseless character assassination, social media attacks, and pointless memetic feuding. How we need
the simplicity of the “barbarian” past more than ever, in this
backbiting era of the indolent and over-coddled “civilized”.

But what, truly, is the Irminsul? How
much do we know about it for certain? And what did it mean to ancient
Runers and Heathens?

By all surviving accounts, this “Irmin
Pillar” was a very holy site to many Germanic tribes. It is
likely that there was more than one sacred Irminsul in
the vast range of lands that the Germanic presence covered.

The Irminsul was a Germanic pagan
pillar-like structure that towered over the landscape. The structure
played an important role in the spiritual ceremonies of the Saxons,
and probably other tribes as well. The oldest chronicle describing an
Irminsul refers to it as a tree trunk erected in the open air. The
purpose of this tree trunk and its metaphysical meanings have been
the subject of considerable scholarly disagreement and well-meaning
speculation for decades.

The Irminsul is perhaps one the least
understood, though most significant, holy images to the Germanic
Heathen - serving throughout the ages as the primary, central figure
in Germanic votive celebrations - this is especially well-documented
among the Saxons, though certainly not limited to them.
Representations of a forked pillar or tree survive from as early as
the Northern or Germanic Bronze Age which clearly predates that of
the Saxons, and similarities or parallels in cultic symbols or glyphs
from other, non-Germanic Indo-European cultures. This lends credence
to the expression of the Irminsul or “Arman-Zal” far beyond that
of the early Saxons alone, though it certainly may be argued that the
representation or image of Irminsul most commonly seen today is that
which was best preserved or remembered (in its distinguished form)
among the Saxons.

The 'Irmin Pillar' was the symbol of
the Saxon people before Christianization. As a result, it was one of
the first targets of Charlemagne's forced conversion campaigns, along
with a living tree known as Thor's Oak – the Frankish emperor knew
that by destroying their most sacred monuments and shrine-trees, he
could symbolize the humiliation and crushing of the soul of the
Saxons, and strike terror into the hearts of even Saxon children who
may never have had the chance to participate in any of the ceremonies
at these sites, but only heard of them.

THE WRITTEN ACCOUNTS

The Franks:

One of the original contemporary
sources on the Saxon Irminsul was that of Charlemagne's own
propagandists. The “Royal Frankish Annals” record that in 772 CE,
the emperor ordered his army to destroy a gigantic pillar called
'Irminsul', which was described as being located near the town of
Heresburg, a town now known as Obermarsberg, in North
Rhine-Westphalia. Jakob Grimm mentioned in 1882 that the Irminsul was
likely in the nearby Teutoberg forest, some 24km distant from
Heresburg1.
This forest, as it turns out, was itself sacred to the Saxons, and
other Germanic tribes as well. It was the region where centuries
earlier, Quintilius Varus and his doomed legions had been destroyed
by Hermann the Cherusker (Arminius), legendary hero of Germanic
freedom. It was also here that the blessings of Tyr were said to be
on the head of any man killed in battle or duel, as Teutoberg, like
the term Teuton itself (and subsequently Teutsch, or Deutsch) was
derived from Tiu or Tiwaz, the Old Germanic form of Tyr. Centuries
later it was a sacred area for a multitude of reasons.

This Irminsul is described as a pillar,
though it is sometimes illustrated as a tree. Either way, it is
generally acknowledged that such holy pillars did represent trees in
ancient Germanic Heathenry.

A decade later, in 782 CE, Charlemagne
returned. Hearing rumors of unrest in the region due to the destruction of their sacred site, he resolved to crush the Saxons once and for all. Some 4,500 Saxon leaders are said to have been beheaded
under his orders for practicing their indigenous Germanic paganism,
having officially, albeit under duress, converted to Christianity and
undergone baptism. The river Aller was said to have been flowing red
with their blood. Charlemagne's motives were to demonstrate his
absolute rule over men's souls as well as their bodies, and the
severity of punishment for any rebellion, even a spiritual one. The massacre happened in the Teutoberg forest, near the town of Verden. It was known as the Bloody Verdict of Verden.

The
effect was that the Saxons lost virtually their entire tribal
leadership and were henceforth largely governed by Frankish counts
installed by Charlemagne. The Saxon leader, Jarl Widukind, had
escaped to his in-laws in Denmark, but soon returned to lead his people, as real military rebellions rose up in revenge for the sacrilege and the murders. In 785, Widukind,
along with his remaining people, was forced to convert to
Christianity by Charlemagne, and allegedly did so, outwardly at
least, to prevent any more bloodbaths. At this point, the Franks are
believed to have largely stopped their destruction of sacred trees,
as the Saxons outwardly abandoned their group veneration of them,
which may have served to protect such trees. They likely continued to
secretly visit such trees in smaller numbers.

In the 20th century, commemorative stones were set up around the fork in the old forest road where the massacre is said to have taken place. Each stone is said to represent one of the the Saxon chiefs who were murdered. The installation took place in 1935 under the supervision of architect Wilhelm Hübotter and was sponsored by the local authorities, though it was met with some controversy on the national level. The Third Reich, at least in later years, officially praised Charlemagne in state-sponsored history books as a great unifier of Europe's "First Reich", and even named a French-volunteer Waffen-SS division after him - for the official state organs, the Massacre of Verden was an inconvenient bygone of the primitive past, to be forgotten rather than memorialized. In the early 1930s, some NSDAP leaders had criticized Charlemagne and labeled him "the butcher of Verden", insisting that history books be revised to honor the slain of Saxony, not the Frankish crusader-emperor. However, later that decade the national mood began to change. As the stance of socialist and Versailles-created states became more hostile to fair trade with Germany, inching towards war at the behest of their international bondholders, Hitler was looking for support from not just Italy, but from anti-Bolshevik parties and factions across Europe. Most of these, such as the Rexists and the Iron Guard, were conservative Christian organizations, for whom Charlemagne was a legend, and the Medieval Saxon wars seemed little more than a provincial conflict. Christianity had won, therefore the majority European view of the emperor's role in history was to be the one adopted.

But many German nationalists disagreed, considering it a French humiliation, much like Versailles. The empire of Charlemagne, they contested, was not a native German Reich in any sense, but a foreign-imposed colonial regime ruled from France and bound by the fanatical (and anti-Germanic) dogma of the Roman church. Major figures in the Germanic cultural revival, also unsuccessfully tried to get the official stance repealed. The surviving followers of Guido von List, such as S.A. Kummer, argued that Charlemagne should not be given any sort of official veneration, as he was, in List's words, the "murderer of Saxons". Though Kummer and other Armanists ended up being arrested or driven underground due to Karl Maria Wiligut's influence on Heinrich Himmler, it is worth mentioning that even some in Himmler's inner circle disapproved of the Reich's official praise of Charlemagne as literally "Karl the Great". Wilhelm Teudt referred to it as a cultural genocide. Hermann Gauch, Himmler's adjutant for culture, proposed that Charlemagne should be renamed "Karl the slaughterer" instead of "Karl the Great". Beyond the SS, Reich historian Alfred Rosenberg stated that it was Widukind, not Karl, who should be called "The Great". This opinion was overruled by conservatives like Göring, Rust and Lammers, who preferred to leave the Christian consensus in place and Germany's religious past alone.

The Monk:

Another account is provided by
Benedictine monk Rudolf of Fulda around 865 CE in his Latin
hagiography, On the Miracles of St. Alexander. Rudolf confirms that
the Irminsul was indeed a colossal wooden pillar carved from a tree
trunk, though he claims it was erected not in a forest, but beneat
the open sky, and revered as a sort of celestial tentpole. He
translates Irminsul as “All-sustaining pillar”, which may be a
bit distorted, though if it were Har-man-sul, it would be an accurate
Runic translation.

The Saxon Chronicler:

After the Saxons had been largely
converted to the Catholic Church, one of their own, Widukind of
Corvey (not to be confused with the legendary Jarl Widukind who fought
Charlemagne's armies) wrote a chronicle of his people known as Deeds
of the Saxons, in which it is implied that multiple Irminsuls were
erected in different locations, also mentioning that an “eagle”
(probably a wooden statue of an eagle) was erected nearby. This may
be related to the wing-like structures on the top of the Irminsul as
depicted today – and perhaps even be a symbol of the unnamed “Eagle
of Yggdrasil”, a manifestation of the Odinic consciousness across
all worlds the bird views.

When morning was come they set up an
eagle at the eastern gate, and erecting an altar of victory they
celebrated appropriate rites with all due solemnity, according to
their ancestral superstition: to the one whom they venerate as their
God of Victory they give the name of Mars, and the bodily
characteristics of Hercules, imitating his physical proportion by
means of wooden columns, and in the hierarchy of their gods he is the
Sun, or as the Greeks call him, Apollo. From this fact the opinion of
those men appears somewhat probable who hold that the Saxons were
descended from the Greeks, because the Greeks call Mars Hirmin or
Hermes, a word which we use even to this day, either for blame or
praise, without knowing its meaning.

While this passage at first seems
rather confused, as the names of Mars, Hercules, Apollo and Hermes
were foreign to the Saxons, when you dig deeper and understand what
the symbolism of these Greco-Roman Gods meant to medieval historians
as highly simplified reductionist archetypes of classical Greco-Roman
religion, the apparently contradictory passage makes more sense. A
few points:

First of all, “God of Victory” in
Germanic languages consistently is rendered as the Runic name
Sig-Tyr, or SiegTivaz in the continental forms. This title is
consistently used only for Odin in the Eddas, so this is a strong
indication that the Irminsul is Odinic in its symbolism.

Second, the claim that the ancient
Saxons called him “Mars” is due to a confusion of Mars with his
Greek equivalent, Ares, whose pronunciation in classical Greek was a
high-A sound (as in Argon, not Ersatz), which brings
“Ares” very close to “Hár” in sound – to earlier Christian
historians, who were also trained in the Greek and Latin classics,
Hár was likely confused with Ares, and thus sometimes written down
as Mars in the predominantly Latin scholarship of the day. Hár, as
we know, is among the most commonly used of Odin's names, meaning
“the Highest”. Ares/Mars is of course the God of War in the
Greco-Roman tradition, so finding some way to connect him with the
Germanic God of Victory – even indirectly through conflating Ares
with Hár, a name which does not relate to Odin's warrior
aspect – was something that both Romans and later Christian authors
would have found convenient, however inaccurate it may actually be.

Third, the mention of Saxons giving the
God of Victory the “bodily characteristics of Hercules” may be an
allusion to the root of the word Irminsul itself. Irmin-sul means
“pillar of Irmin”, and Irmin himself, a name closely linked with
the esoteric Arman, is also rendered as Jörmunr in Old Norse, which
means “Mighty” or “Cosmically Vast”. This attribute of cosmic
strength immediately brings to mind Hercules in the Greco-Roman
classical tradition, who at the time of Widukind of Corvey, was more
familiar to the Christianized and Latin-educated German scribes than
their own ancestors' Gods. Thus it is not all that strange how Irmin
or Jörmunr, as a signifying strength, could be translated into Latin
as “Hercules” or understood as such – even though in terms of
the cosmology and archetypal role, Odin is not all that similar to
Hercules. Thor or Heimdall would be make a better comparison.

Fourth, Widukind the Chronicler mentions that the
Saxons represented his “physical proportion” by means of wooden
columns – which should not be taken too literally as “proportions”
in our modern sense, but perhaps as a symbolic indicator of
“Vastness” as the name Irmin/Jörmunr implies.

Fifth, Widukind mentions that the
Saxons' God of Victory is held in their pantheon to be in the
position of the Sun. Yet while he tacks on the Greek personification
of the Sun as Apollo, it turns out that for early Teutons and Saxons,
their understanding of the Sun was very different than the Greek one.
For the Greeks of the Classical Period, Apollo was tertiary in
importance to Zeus and the local city's patron God or Goddess (though
for the Archaic period, Kronos had been dominant, not Zeus). For the
later Norse eras (Vendel and Viking), the Sun seems to also have
taken a subordinate backseat to most of the Gods in cosmology as the
feminine Sunna, held as more or less equal with the masculine moon or
Mani. But for the earlier Continental Germanic tradition, this does
not seem to have been the case. The Sun was front and center in their
rituals as their solar henges or “Halgadoms” indicate, and their
early use of the Fylfot or Fire-whisk as a burning symbol of the
Winter Solstice reflects the essentially Somar nature of old Germanic
spirituality. The Sun was not a lesser deity for the Ur-Germans, or
even their Saxon descendants – it was in Primal Position, an
elemental principle perhaps even higher than the Gods, hence why it
is embodied as a Rune – the mighty Sig or Sol rune – and for the
early Rune-masters, the Runes were held to be higher powers than even
the Aesir – they were, literally, the Gods of the Gods, energies
which even made Odin greater than he had been without them.

Sometimes the Irminsul is reconstructed with a solar-cross,
representing the "fire-whisk" at top, instead of wing-like branches.

It is then no surprise that the popular
notion of Odin being connected with the Sun, and more recently with
the revived Sonnenrad symbol, was well-known folk knowledge, even
among later generations of post-conversion Saxons who may not have
been totally sure how Odin could be both a Sun-God and also a
Germanic “Ares” at once.

Sixth, though Widukind is wrong about
his people being descended from Greeks, the relation of the name
Hermes with Irmin may actually have a viable esoteric (if not
necessarily linguistic) basis. Hermes, though a relatively minor
figure in the Greek pantheon, is nonetheless associated with wisdom,
strategy and curiosity, which are major Odinic qualities. Indeed many
Roman chroniclers like Tacitus contended that the Germanic tribes
worshiped “Mercury” or Hermes formost among all Gods, by which he
probably meant that their chief God is a God of Wisdom and
exploration. This almost certainly points to Odin/Wotan having
already been the King of Asgard in the mythos of Migration-Age
Germanic tribes, despite academic claims that he only became known as
such later on and that Tyr held that position in those early times.
However it must be pointed out that, as in all cases of Greco-Roman
'comparative religion', the conflation of Odin with Mercury or Hermes
is extremely misleading. The two are nothing alike in most aspects,
particularly with Hermes being more of a mischievous errand-boy and
sometime-gadfly on Olympus, than a great leader like Odin is in
Asgard; Hermes is also considered a patron of herdsmen and
professional thieves, which are certainly not Odinic or even Aryan
attributes.

Nonetheless it is no surprise that the
popular notion of Odin being connected with curiosity, wisdom and
exploration, and with winged helmets (which, though not directly
attested in surviving Germanic Lore or artifacts, does have other
Indo-European analogues) may have led to him being confused with
Hermes by Romans, and even among post-conversion Saxons who may not
have been totally sure how Odin could be a Sun-God, and a Germanic
“Ares”, and also a Germanic “Hermes” all at once.

Of course the fact that Wotan in the
Germanic worldview is a greater, more multi-faceted and more
mysterious being than either Ares or Hermes, is something perhaps
incomprehensible to the classical Greek or Roman, who tended to
compartmentalize Gods by limited roles, as opposed to recognizing
greater overarching energies and archetypes in their natures.
Odin/Wotan is a master of all situations, though this happened
through many incarnations and sacrifices; thus he has practical and
noble (though not legalistic) responses to seemingly all challenges,
though in some cases these may force the apprentice to completely
rethink his own naive impression of what Nobility and God-Nature
truly is.

The top of the Irminsul is often identified with an Eagle.
The Eddas also mention a great Eagle watching the Nine Worlds from the top of Yggdrasil.

The Local Bishops:

In the reign of Louis the Pious in the
9th century CE, a stone column was dug up at Obermarsberg in
Westphalia – the same location mentioned by the Frankish Annals as
being the site of the Saxon Irminsul. This column was relocated to
the cathedral in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, and was reportedly then
used as an outdoor candelabrum for Candlemass until at least the late
19th century – which indicates that the pillar, like its modern
depictions, must have had some sort of “arms” at the top which
could mount multiple candles. Whether the Church authorities at
Hildesheim cathedral were aware of this column's likely Heathen
status as an Irminsul, is unknown. Candlemass falls on February 2,
which was originally the date of the Dísablót or Disting in
Germanic Heathenry, the rite of the Dísir (Goddesses
and female ancestors and spirits). The Celts referred to this day as
“Imbolc” and gave it many of the same connotations, though with
differing rituals. Bears would emerge from hibernation at this time,
and among both cultures the emerging mother bear, with her newborn
cubs, was associated with the February festival. Names associated
with both bears and new birth, such as the Norse Bjorn, Bjarnum,
Bjork – which also is linked with the Birch tree as symbol of
rebirth – as well as the Celtic Brigid, Birgitta, etc. were often
given to children born at this time of year.

Dísablót on its surface does
not appear to have any connection with Odin or the Irminsul – and
yet, without Dísir of various sorts, many of Odin's initiatic
journeys would not make sense. Odin alone among the Gods confronted
and defied the Norns, who are sometimes considered as cosmic Disir.
Odin raises the Volva of the Dead, and also trades Runic knowledge in
exchange for Seidhr-knowledge with Freyja, the great Vana- Dís
herself. In addition, if Dísir are taken to mean specifically
female ancestors, one also cannot ignore Odin's very intimate role in
turning mere maidens into true Dísir, some of whose blood
descendants, if the Sagas are to be taken to heart, are still alive
today. Odin the Lover is a facet of Allfather too often ignored by
both academics and many modern Heidevolk.

Hildesheim cathedral

Another Christian ritual involving the
Irminsul took place at Hildesheim cathedral, though not involving the
actual stone pillar from Obermarsberg. This ritual was one invented
by local Churchmen purely to poison the minds of the Saxons agains
their own ancestors, by re-enacting the destruction of the Irminsul
by Charlemagne as a festive celebration on the Saturday after Rose
Sunday.

The “celebration” was reportedly
done by planting two poles six feet high, each topped with a wooden
pyramid or a cone – since by this late period any idea of the
Irminsul's true crowning top was forgotten, and as dictated by Church
tradition, it was assumed that all “pagan” sacred objects were in
some way associated with Egypt, pyramids, obelisks, and so forth.
Young boys then used sticks and stones to knock over the poles. This
custom was also promoted by Church officials elsewhere in Germany,
particularly in Halberstadt where it was enacted on the day of Rose
Sunday by the Canons themselves.1

The Hohenstaufens:

Konrad III Hohenstaufen, a German king
of Swabian ancestry who rose to rule the “Holy Roman” Empire,
commissioned a vast “Kaiser-Chronicle” in 1146, to document Roman
and German history from Julius Caesar up until the rise of the Hohenstaufen dynasty and his own reign. The
unknown author compiled this book in Regensburg in the late 1140s,
from a smattering of earlier sources, some of which evidently
mentioned the Irminsul so casually that one may understand it to have
persisted as a common symbol in the folk-consciousness of not merely
Saxons, but all Germans, even up to the High Middle Ages.

Regarding the meaning of Wednesday, or
Wotanstag:

"On an Irminsul - stands an
enormous idol - which they call their merchant."2

This is an unusual reference
considering that nowhere else is the Irminsul known to have an “idol”
on top of it, and the label of “merchant” also seems odd –
until you realize that the Irminsul's wing-like branches resemble the
winged Caduceus, which, though sometimes associated with medicine
(due to its confusion with the rod of Aesculapius), was originally a
Hermes/Mercury-connected symbol of commerce and trade. Though the
Germanic tribes honored Wotan, not Hermes, nonetheless the
resemblance of the Irminsul to the Cadeceus (as well as its
serpentine/spinal connotations, which are to be discussed elsewhere)
hints at a common Indo-European origin for both symbols, with trade
and prosperity being one of the alternate meanings of the Irminsul.
This wing-like structure at its top, and not a literal statue, was
likely the “idol” mentioned.

Caduceus

Irminsul

The Kaiser-Chronicle also mentioned an
Irminsul in connection with, oddly enough, Julius Caesar:

"The Romans slew him
treacherously - and buried his bones in an Irminsul."3

While Caesar's ashes were indeed
originally buried under a great stone pillar in Rome, an anti-Caesar
faction soon toppled it, after which the faction of Octavian
(Augustus) defeated them and built a gigantic funerary temple to
house Caesar's remains. There is no reason to believe that the
original pillar was in any sense an Irminsul; perhaps the chronicler
is merely applying the Irminsul, as symbol of Irmin/Wotan's own
self-secrifice and return, to the Roman custom of deifying Caesar
with a sacred pillar.

It is not immediately clear how one can
climb “upon” an Irminsul without the aid of stairs, ropes, or
built-in handgrips, and not risk a deadly fall. It may be possible
that Nero merely climbed onto a wider pedestal which had a stone
Irminsul mounted on top of it, rather than the top of the Irminsul
itself. The theory of extremely large Irminsuls with internal spiral
stairs is unlikely.

Connection with Thor's Oak:

Sacred trees were well-known in
Germanic and many other Indo-European cultures. The first man and
woman to be given true sense and consciousness, Aske and Embla, were
made from trees by Vili-Ve-Wotan, much as in the Iranian legend of
Mashya and Mashyana being given form by Vayu-Vata from trees. What is
less well-known, is whether the Irminsul was also represented by
living trees, rather than wood or stone pillars, in Germanic sacred
sites. Though Wotan's Irminsuls seem to have all been either dead
wood or carved stone, it is possible that live trees were also
connected with him.

After all, not only is Odin/Wotan known
as Jörmunr or Irmin, the Mighty – but also as Yggr, the Terrible
One (Avestan cognate = Yangham, the Great Cataclysm), in
recognition of his reputation as exacting terrible and unpredictable
revenge on ignoble Jotuns. And thus, the World Tree itself is called
Yggdrasil, a kenning which means Yggr's Steed. Thus, the inescapable
conclusion that Irminsul, the winged Pillar of the Mighty, is itself
a representation of that infinite central Pillar of the universe,
Yggdrasil itself. Thus, it is likely that some living sacred trees
also were connected with Wotan.

But the famous “Donar's Oak” or
Thor's Oak, was not one of them. Sacred trees and groves were
extremely common in Indo-European cultures. Trees in general were
never limited to association with any one particular God, though
specific trees could be. Thus there may have been multiple Thor's
Oaks in different tribal regions, multiple Freyr's Elm trees,
Freyja's Yew trees, and so forth. In Germany, the name of the Goddess
Berchta herself is derived from, among other meanings, the Birch tree
– symbol of fertility and rebirth. But as with the Irminsul, direct
Lore-context from actual ancient Heathen tribes is erased from
history. These sacred trees were all destroyed as thoroughly as the
rites of the Gothar and Vitkar that tended them, and the surviving
Armanen who took much of this knowledge underground were not seen
again until the late 19th century.

Thor's Oak was a tree sacred to the
people of Hesse, near the Frankish borderlands. This was the
ancestral homeland of the Brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
themselves, to whom we owe not just the famous children's fairy-tales
of essentially Medieval German origin, but also a series of core
books on Germanic culture and the more adult Lore of pre-Christian
times.

It may be tempting to assume from this
appellation of the tree, that the Hessians were mostly Thorsmen
rather than Odinsmen – though it could be that Thor's Oak was one
of many sacred trees dedicated to multiple Gods in Hesse, and the
fate of the others has not come down to us. Thor's Oak was not the
Irminsul, nor is there any indication that the two were
interchangeable. But as so few accounts of sacred trees, pillars,
stelae and the like survive regarding the Germanic tribes, historians
have often compared the two.

Donar was the name of Thor in western
German and Frisian dialects. The Saxons, who migrated across Germany
several times, knew him as Thunor or Thunearr. The great Hessian Oak
tree itself was apparently a site of offerings and sacrifices to
Donar, who due to the association with thunder, was identified by the
syncretistic Romans as Jupiter or Jove. This mistaken renaming
carried forward into Christian accounts of the tree's destruction,
where it was called “Jupiter's Oak”.

The most famous of these writings is
Bishop Willibald's Life of St. Boniface, which describes, in rather
fantastical terms, the violent attack of the fabled saint upon the
ways of the Hessians and their sacred tree some time after 720 CE,
roughly half a century before Charlemagne wrecked the Irminsul:

Now at that time many of the
Hessians, brought under the Catholic faith and confirmed by the grace
of the Sevenfold Sacraments, received the laying on of hands; others
indeed, not yet strengthened in soul, refused to accept in their
entirety the lessons of the inviolate faith. Moreover some were
inclined secretly, some openly, to make sacrifices to trees and
springs; some in secret, others openly practiced autopsies and
divinations, legerdemain and incantations; some turned their
attention to auguries and auspices and various sacrificial rites;
while others, with sounder minds, abandoned all the profanations of
heathenism, and committed none of these things.

With the advice and counsel of these
last ones, the saint attempted, in the place called Gaesmere, while
the servants of God stood by his side, to fell a certain oak of
extraordinary size, which is called, by an old name of the pagans,
the Oak of Jupiter. And when in the strength of his steadfast heart
he had cut the lower notch, there was present a great multitude of
pagans, who in their souls were earnestly cursing the enemy of their
gods. But when the fore side of the tree was notched only a little,
suddenly the oak's vast bulk, driven by a blast from above, crashed
to the ground, splintering its crown of branches as it fell; and, as
if by the gracious compensation of the Most High, it was also burst
into four parts, and four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were
seen... At this sight the pagans who before had cursed, now on the
contrary believed, and blessed the Lord, and put away their former
reviling. Then moreover the most holy bishop, after taking counsel
with the brethren, built from the timber of the tree the town's
wooden oratory, and dedicated it in honor of Saint Peter the apostle.

The location of this alleged event, and
of the oak itself, has been debated. The town of Gaesmere, or
Geismar, has never been pinned down as there are many small towns and
villages in Hesse with this name. Nonetheless it can be understood
that in Willibald's time its correct location was well-known. It is
more likely that the tree was felled and quartered into four pieces
by Boniface's soldiers – Boniface at the time was a missionary
bishop with a small army of Church-sponsored Frankish mercenaries to
“convince” Germanic tribes to accept the new religion.

Not coincidentally, both Boniface and
Willibald were Anglo-Saxon men born in England, at a time when it had
been fully Christianized, but Germany had still not been. Their Saxon
language would have been similar to continental German dialects; at
the time, the Church used these evangelizing Anglo-Saxon priests as
convenient “native agents” who were judged more useful than
Frankish priests when it came to dividing and conquering their German
kin who were still Heathen. In this context, the attacks of the
Vikings against Anglo-Saxon monastaries start to make some real
political sense – the Norse and Danes were not unaware of the
crimes of Christian missionaries in Germania, with the Danes
bordering Saxon lands - and their well-developed trade networks also
made them far more aware of information regarding both the Franks and
the Anglo-Saxons than mainstream history often assumed. The Vikings
would have known that the Monks of England were not as innocent as
all that.

The Sacred Tree of Great Uppsala:

Much has been said about the Irminsul
and Thor's Oak, and it is known that a gigantic sacred tree, usually
rumored to be an Ash (though some recent interpreters claim it was
probably a Yew), was also present near the great hall at Gamla
Uppsala in its time as the center of Heathen Sweden. Whether it was
dedicated to a particular deity is unknown. Indeed, almost nothing is
known about it for certain other than it being a tree of
near-legendary size, and possibly being involved in some of the Old
Norse rites mentioned by Adam of Bremen in his rather grisly fashion.

This great tree may have been seen as a
symbol of Yggdrasil in microcosm, but even this is not certain,
though it may be a recurring motif with all such sacred trees. None
of them were actually Yggdrasil, nor is it likely that any ancient
Heathens literally believed they were - and yet they all still
represented Yggdrasil in some tangible way, even those not connected
with Odin.

At this point there is not much more
that can be said about the Great Tree of Uppsala. There is no trace
of it left in the ground, nor are there any true eyewitness accounts
of its appearance.

***

THE ESOTERIC VIEW, AND THE EXTERNSTEINE

According to some Esoteric Runers,
including (allegedly) a fair number of Armanists, the original holy
pillar known as Irminsul was not near Obermarsberg, as the Frankish
Annals claim, but rather stood near the giant Odinic sanctuary of the
Externsteine, a set of giant natural rock formations which stand near
the city of Horn-Bad-Meinberg. It must be admitted that these two
proposed locations, however, are not very far apart, as both are in
Westphalia, which was only a small part of Saxon domains.

Originally Horn-Bad-Meinberg was two
small towns – Horn, and Bad Meinberg, which later merged. The
closer of these two to Externsteine is the town of Horn (whose name
itself is said to be derived from the shape of the Irminsul – whose
curving crown-branches appear like horns). The Christian invaders
bemoaned this “horned pillar” as a devilish sign, and tried
everything to undermine or besmirch it, yet the local tribes held
fast to their holy symbol and refused to give it up. The story
traditionally told is that in the nearby locale of Verden,
Charlemagne promised the Saxon chiefs peace and an end to his
incursions, only to smuggle weapons inside the Great Hall where the
peace was to be negotiated, whereupon he slaughtered them unarmed in
the hall. Later, Charlemagne destroyed the Oak of Thor, as well as
the Irminsul at Externsteine (though some tales say he left this task
to one of his bishops, who was given his own small army with which to
torment the pagans).

Some generations later, the brutal
forced conversions and massacres of Verden and the rest of Saxony
were memorialized in a strange and somewhat macabre, almost Boschian
relief carving in the side of the Externsteine stones. This relief
depicts two Germanic deities being sidelined by a gigantic Christian
cross, and both weeping tears of sorrow, as a dispassionate
resurrected Jesus (oddly enough, holding a pagan Teutonic sun-cross
standard) points down at the fate of the local people below. Some of
them are missing arms and legs, and yet still shuffling along as if
to some higher cause. The Irminsul itself, however, appears not to be
broken or amputated, but actually bending down, bowing – to a
figure holding a book, who is either a second, earthly depiction of
Christ, or a bishop acting in his name. Some archaeologists identify
this figure with Nicodemus, though this is conjecture.

Thus, this bizarre sculpture depicts
the Paulian prophecy that “Every living thing will acknowledge
Christ as Lord, and every knee shall bend” - with the Irminsul
itself literally bending, and made very small (whereas by all
accounts the real thing was unquestionably huge). And even though
this carved relief appears to glorify Christianity, on the other hand
it shows the human subjects of this submission to the new faith as
being mangled and maimed beyond all hope of dignity and wholeness.
True, the kingdom of the Church has won this battle – it mad the
“prophecy” come true in Europe by force – but at what cost? The
very soul of the Germanic folk, symbolized by the once-mighty
amputees carrying each other's corpses beneath the shadow of that
bloody cross, has been mutilated with wounds that may never heal, til
the Sun claims us all once more. That, at least, is the hidden
message of pagan protest that this ostensibly Christian carving is
secretly trying to tell us. The makers of this image clearly had
problems with the Church's Brave New World.

More recently, this carving has been
used as the original source for modern esoteric depictions of the
Irminsul (unbent, of course). This is how we know what it truly
looked like for the Saxons. While there has been some condemnation of
this esoteric view from the official academia, who tend to deny that
this is indeed an Irminsul, in reality there are too many connections
to allow us to simply dismiss this unusual “bent tree” as
anything else. There is the Kaiser-Chronicle reference to commerce,
the traditional identification of Wotan with Hermes (and thus the
Caduceus, staff of commerce) in Latin-speaking societies, and the
caduceus-like “wings” of the Irminsul depicted at Externsteine.
The serpent-symbolism of the Caduceus is also particularly telling,
as it carries not one but two serpents twisted around its shaft.
There are two great cosmic dragons or serpents connected with the
World Tree in Germanic Lore – Nidhogg (the Devourer of the Cursed)
and Jörmungandr (the staff or “wand” of Jörmunr – in other
words, of Irmin, or Odin!)

On an esoteric level, the deeper
symbolic meanings of the Caduceus and of Yggdrasil/Irminsul and its
serpents, are one and the same! This is Wotan's pillar of Wisdom and
Sacrifice, the Steed of Irmin, the repository of the timeless and
eternal Runes, the wings/branches of prosperity, in whose boughs are
nestled the ever-living realms of Asgard and Vanaheim, and the nest
of the great Eagle. Thus the shape of these branches, or “horns”
or “wings” resonates not only with the Caduceus, but also with
the wings of that great Eagle, which was and is eternally an emblem
of Allfather, even above the Ravens. The Eagle as emblem of
Vayu-Vata, goes back to the very beginnings of Aryan blood-memory and
consciousness, long before currently recorded history - and became
the national herald and banner for a whole multitude of
Aryan-descended Kings, from Cyrus the Great, to the 14th
Jain Tirkanthar, Anatanatha, to Marbod the Brave, to Sigurd Hring,
and even the pre-Republican monarchs of Rome.

On a yet deeper esoteric level, the
Irminsul represents the spine and soul-complex of the Runer as a
model of Yggdrasil in microcosm, and its complete form would have
also included two winding serpents similar to a Caduceus, but with
one spiraling up around the trunk, and one spiraling down, both
symbolizing the circulation of Od-force. The upward-moving
serpent, Nidhogg, represents the coiled Natterkraft, at the
base of the spine, which the Indo-Aryans termed “Kundalini” -
this energy seeks to move up and empower the body by devouring its
ignoble impurities or regressive karma (known to Armanists as
degenerate karma or enkarma) and manifesting noble, focused
karma, known as Garma – a term signifying both Odin's Spear
(Gar or Gungnir), and spiritual heat and vitality. It is this
same Garma that ancient Aryans symbolically revived each
Yul-Tag or Yalda with the jumping over fire, a symbol of Wotan's
fire-whisk and the renewal of that Ur-fyr of noble excellence,
health and exploration. Nearly all Indo-European cultures retain a
seasonal fire festival to some extent as a result of this, and nearly
all involve some form of invocation to the fire to “remove my
sickly yellow (bile, phlegm), and give me your virile red hue!” The
downward-moving serpent is Jörmungandr - it is the downward flow of
frustratedorwasted Od-force
always seeking to sink its head down to the lowest depths of base
instincts to be reborn upward, though Thor/Thunar/Vire-Thuragna –
embodying the Will - is seeking to control and guide it to
constructive ends even on its chaotic way down, by violence if need
be. The Raden, or Chakras (in Armanenschaft, there are nine of
them, not merely the seven retained by the Hindu traditions) are
spiritual-somatic wheels or gatehouses in the Lich (earthly
spirit-body) that must be opened to allow steady circulation of the
two serpent energies.

Irminsul with the nine Raden or Chakras

Irminsul is thus both the symbol of
Yggdrasil, and of the spine and Raden of the Lich. It
is also both an eagle-symbol and a serpent-symbol, which in Aryan
diffusion theory is a central part of understanding of the early
influence on worldwide solar cultures far from Indo-European lands.

The entire discipline of Stadhagaldr,
or Rune-Yoga in the Armanen tradition, is ultimately based around
using the resonant rune-forms as body postures to refine and control
these serpentine flows of Od-force up and down the spine of
the Lich. Where Indian Yoga schools use the basic “sitting
yogi” diagram to map the chakras and the spinal energy flow,
Rune-Yoga uses the Irminsul, for man is Yggdrasil in microcosm –
this is the symbolic meaning of the Edda when it says Aske and Embla
were created from trees. It is indeed the World Tree whose essence
they were taken from, and it lives in us now. The Gods descent from
Buri who grew out of Ginnungagap, the Jotuns descend from Ymir who
also grew out of Ginnungagap. Humans grew out of Yggdrasil which is a
mix of Ymir's flesh and the Aesir's minds – thus there is both an
Asa and a Jotun within us. The purpose of the Runic path is to refine
the Asa-nature, and as the Jotun-nature will never be fully
eliminated, to form it into a type that corresponds to Asa-nature, as
one can say of some of the rare noble Jotnar like Aegir, Skadi, etc.

The aim of herder religions, is to wipe
out or bury this consciousness by any means possible, so that no alternative is left to their pastoralist orthodoxy.

In Germany, the Franks not
only attempted to stamp out Runes and even their orthographic use,
but also were rumored (in esoteric circles anyway) to have burned any
flammable artifacts relating to Runes, and killed anyone who
practiced Runic ceremonies or exercises. About a century after
Charlemagne's destruction, a uniquely anti-Aesir “Saxon baptismal
vow” intended for the local populace, was written down in western
Saxony, near Franconia. Later, the manuscript was kept in a library in the city of Mainz, and now resides in the Vatican as part of Codex Pal. 577. The vow reads as follows:

I renounce the devil. And I renounce
all worship of the devil. And I renounce all the deeds and words of
the devil, Thunear, Woden and Saxnot, and all those fiends that are
their companions. I believe in God, the Almighty Father. I believe in
Christ the Son of God. I believe in the Holy Ghost.

Here, Saxnot, also rendered Seaxneat,
means “sword-companion” and is a clear reference to Tyr. The
Tuitones, a tribe described by Tacitus and later called “Teutons”,
claimed descent from Tyr. Now as the Saxons may have derived their
name from Saxnot, it is possible they too claimed the God of War as
their ancestor. Though it is called a Saxon baptismal vow, it might
as well be called the “Anti-Saxon” baptismal vow, for it requires
the Saxons to renounce and curse the Gods of their ancestors right
next to “the devil”, including the deity for whose kenning their
tribe was named, and from whom they likely claimed descent!

Strangely, the name Irmin is not
mentioned in the vow, but Woden is. It is possible that Irmin or
Jörmunr was (at least in some areas) a name for Odin that was used
mainly among the skalds and Gothar, not the common folk, though the
Irminsul itself apparently remained well-known on other parts of
Germany. As it was, all such prominently Heathen individuals in the
local villages had long been driven underground, tortured or
murdered.

At Externsteine, there are yet more
clues to this dark and cloaked period.

Not only is Externsteine the probable
site of a major Irminsul, but also as a natural megalith it has
symbolic importance to Runers that even supersedes that of a man-made
Henge or Halgadom. This is one that the Od-force itself made, a
natural fruit of Yggdrasil. It makes perfect sense that ancient
Saxons (or perhaps an even older Indo-European people) erected a
great Irminsul near this place. It also makes sense that the
survivors of Charlemagne's butchery would document here, in barely
veiled mockery, their humiliation at the hands of the Church and its
temporal lieutenants. The Irminsul carved into the rock wall may be
bent – but not broken. You may bend us for now, the carvers say
– but we will never break, and while your cross may be dead wood,
our Yggdrasil is ever alive, and our very spines manifest its might
beneath the sun; someday we shall see who is the one cut off.

Interestingly, the six giant stone
pillars of Externsteine, were also depicted in miniature in a small
carving on the stones of the site itself, with the 18 Armanen runes
carved, with three runes for each of the six pillars, from Fa all the
way to Gibor - along with a solar spiral symbol above. The age of these Armanen carvings is unknown; some
claim them to be the work of ancient Rune-masters such as the
ancestors of the Lauterer clan; others deny this and insist these
carvings are a 20th-century phenomenon carved by the modern Armanists
themselves. As recently as 1992, the carvings were still intact. In
more recent years, some idiot has gone out to the Externsteine,
probably in the dead of night, added a lunar crescent, and defaced the original runes by
carving extra lines and symbols, obscuring the runes Fa, Ur, Ka, Is,
Ar, Laf, Tyr, and Gibor.

The Runes of Externsteine as they originally appeared.

The Runes of Externsteine now, after the attack.

Yet the Armanen runes are not forgotten, and the Externsteine have lost none of their potency as a mystical Od-nexus.

Thus, despite repeated attempts to
Christianize or devalue the site, the Externsteine remains, in
Mainland Europe anyway, as the beacon of the Heathen world - the most
blessed stead, surely, of the Northern Tradition yesterday and today.
Additionally, it serves as a standout among the most major religious
and social foci in the landscape of the ancient Europe. Taller than
Stonehenge, more vast than the Celtic chalk hill-carvings, and older
than humanity itself. The stone itself dates back to the Early
Cretaceous, the height of the Dinosaur Age, when must of Europe was
underwater, yet Lower Saxony itself was a lone island inhabited by
Europasaurus and other hardy land animals, while nessie-like
plesiosaurs swam the surrounding northern seas. Thus the Externsteine
even as geological formation, has great age and intense meaning of a
sort of Hoch-Zeit of its own. As its grains were formed in the height
of one primordial Great Age, it points symbolically to the crowning
heights of subsequent Great Ages. As it was already dated by the time
of the modern Armanists, it is doubtless they knew of its ancient
age, the possibility of the very real “dragons” that once lived
there, and all the cosmic symbolism this entailed. Central to this
symbolism of the “High Golden Age” is Irminsul.

So in a more detailed sense, what
does the Irminsul stand for?

The “Irmin” component of the
name is an Old Saxon adjective that transliterates as “colossal
strength” or “Great/strong ”. Irminsul in its literal
interpretation potentially refers to the Germanic spiritual concept
of spiritual pillars, Irminsuls which are pillars that were used as
totems, or statues of worship in the classic shape. These pillars
may be symbolic of the greatest Pillar of all, the World Tree
Yggdrasil, which supports Asgard in the top of its very branches.

The name Irmin potentially refers
to one of the alternate regional Old Saxon names for a major God.
Sometimes Irmin is interpreted as being Tyr, or more accurately, as
being Wotan or Odin. The Old Norse equivalent of the name Irmin is
Jörmunr (the Mighty one), which is one of the names of Odin in the
Eddas – so it is highly likely that Irmin, too, is Odin. As it
turns out, the alternative association of Irmin with Tyr is probably
incorrect, as Tyr was known by a far more common name among the
Saxons, that of Saxnot or Seaxneat – literally,
sword-companion – which fits Tyr's description in the Germanic
lore far more precisely than Irmin does.

It should be noted that in Old
Norse alone, over 200 names have been attributed to Odin or his
various incarnations, such as Grimnir, Hár, Hangatyr, Hroptatyr,
and Jörmunr. Factor in all the Old English, Old German and regional
variations, not to mention all the countless names associated with
his more distant Indo-European manifestations outside of Europe
(i.e. Vayu-Vata, Har-Vaad), and you realize a staggering
possibility: that the names of Odin must over the entirety of
Indo-European history have numbered into the thousands. Some
Indo-Iranian deities were depicted standing upright like a pillar,
with two outstretched “horns” resembling Irminsul rising above
their heads. The name Arman, cognate with Irmin, existed in both
Germanic and Iranian languages, meaning 'Arising' in the former and
'Ideal' in the latter. As the supreme Arman, Vayu-Vata is the ideal
of wisdom manifest.

Irminsul, alternatively, could be
a symbol strictly of the tribal Gods unique to specific Germanic
tribes (Saxons and similar) that share Irmin as perhaps a title in
their name, though this could additionally simply be their local
name for Wotan/Odin, who as mentioned before, has a vast pan-Aryan
influence and many “avatars” in each culture that knows him.

Irminsul refers also to Yggdrasil
through the connection to Irmin/Jörmunr which is one of the names
of Odin – who is also consistently connected with the name Yggr,
which forms an integral component of Yggdrasil the World Tree.
Yggdrasil actually translates to “Yggr’s steed”,
metaphorically the “horse” which Yggr (Odin) “rode” as he
hung himself on it for nine nights to obtain the Runes.

VIKING SHIPS

The Irminsul shape was also copied in a
central pillar in some designs of Viking longships, and sometimes duplicated near the front of the ship. This short pillar
does not have any apparent utilitarian purpose for steering the ship,
or for navigation. Yet it consistently appears in surviving examples
of these ships.

Gokstad Viking ship

Thus, even though Viking warriors traditionally wore
a Mjolnir pendant (though there is nothing to indicate that all of
them did) on their travels, the Irminsul of Odin is what they they
built into the very body of the ship. Whereas Thor was often viewed
as the protector of the common man, of the farmer-turned-raider in
times of strife and famine, Odin was apparently guardian over the
entire group of warriors on that ship – All-Father of folk and
community. In this sense, his mnemonic connection with the Odal-rune
makes more sense, though his nature as a wanderer in the Eddas may
not at first strike one as particularly connected with homesteads.
Odin is integral to the cohesion of folk and community, even if they
are forced out of one homeland and into another.

Even Viking anchors seemed to resemble the Irminsul, with a very long shaft and double-curved arms.

Oseberg ship anchor

Irminsul is a noble icon integral to
the core of Germanic spirituality, indeed, for all ancient Aryan
spiritualities, for what it represents via the stories of the Gods
and Goddesses, primarily through the Aesir, whose consciousness flows
in the blood-memory of one's soil-tilling folk, whose sacrifice to
defend the land whose fruits, not the migrating herds, sustained
them, bound them to the land like the very heartstrings themselves of
a Solar folk. People whose ancestors were never farmers, or never
cultivated the soil, sadly will never understand the precious meaning
of this truth – and may even try to degrade or destroy it.

Irminsul is also a sacred esoteric
symbol to Runers and especially Armanen, as it represents the organic
spiritual growth also present in the Man-rune, and indeed is the
symbol of Yggdrasil, repository of all Runic knowledge. The
long-concealed practice of Stadhagaldr would also not be complete
without the occult energetic meanings of the Irminsul. Some Germanic warrior helmets included an Irminsul-like shape on the "eyebrows" and nose guard, likely to honor Irmin/Odin himself. The resemblances to the actual Irminsul are uncanny.

Reconstructions of a Vendel helmet (left) and a Saxon "Sutton Hoo" helmet (right)

In this sense, the Irminsul is not
merely a long-gone wooden pillar destroyed by Christians. It is a
structure beyond the merely physical plane. It is Yggdrasil itself,
of which the stylized pillar is a symbolic representation. For
reasons that have been lost to all but the true Armanen, the ancient
Germanic tribes saw Externsteine as a major nexus-point of Odic
energy and the occlusion of Yggdrasil's greater consciousness into
our world of Midgard.

IRMINSUL-LIKE SYMBOLS IN OTHER CULTURES

Initially when I first came across the
Irminsul, I saw a near-consensus among written sources, that despite
so little being written and preserved about it, this was a symbol
confined only to the Continental Germanic (and more specifically,
Saxon) tradition. However, its presence in Viking ship-pillars
confirms that it was know well outside of the Saxon cultural context.
We know that it was, at the very least, common to Germanic cultures
in general.

After a bit of exploration I realized
that the Irminsul is far older and deeper than even that. It appears
to be a pan-Aryan symbol that left its imprint all over many
seemingly unrelated cultures that came into contact with Aryan
voyagers, who had already mastered metallurgy and the production of scale-armor, which led to their iconic portrayals as as "fish-folk" by stone-age cultures who saw them.

Sumerian culture, which was neither
Semitic nor Aryan, records in its oldest myths, the legend that all
the knowledge of Sumerian civilization actually came from a foreign
race of tall and (mostly) golden-haired and blue-eyed people known as Abgallu, clad
in “silver scales like a fish” (implying steel armor, at a time
when most of the planet was still in the Stone Age). In any case,
such myths are typically dismissed by mainstream academia as the
deluded fantasies of “primitive ancient peoples”. But are they
really?

These statues made by Sumerians are though to represent Abgallu.

Earlier I have mentioned the tale of
the Abgallu, and how their purported homeland of “Dilmun” was
most likely the north-Iranian Dailaman on the Caspian Sea, and not
Bahrain, as mainstream scholarship fanatically insists. Bahrain,
unlike Dailaman, has no history of metallurgy or Indo-European
culture, much less any golden-haired giants with metal swords or fish-like armor.

Whereas Dailaman was always home to master-smiths and today still has
a few populations that match the general description of the Abgallu. Of course, in all likelihood the Abgallu were not all blond or blue-eyed. These are just the traits that stood out most starkly to the Sumerians who witnessed them.

Though the name Dailaman was abandoned in Medieval times for “Gilan” and there are no full-blooded
Abgallu in Iran anymore, just as there are no full-blooded Yamnaya or
Corder-Ware people left in Europe. Their descendants are scattered in a myriad of ethnic groups, and even many northern Iranians who don't look much like the stereotypical Abgallu, still have some Dilmuni ancestry. Nonetheless, you would definitely notice a classic Dilmuni phenotype when you see one. They're rather hard to miss.

The people of Dilmun not only took
Aryan technology and spirituality to Sumer, but also Aryan symbolism,
including Har-visp-tokm (the All-seed-tree, the Indo-Iranian term for
Yggdrasil).

It is inevitable that this metaphysical
tree would be depicted differently in different cultures. Yet in the
version that survives in Mesopotamian sculptures, copied from Sumer
by the Assyrians (who themselves were once governed by a small Aryan
ruling class), elements of the Germanic-style Irminsul can be seen.

The Sumero-Assyrian “Tree of Life” has many repeating elements which look exactly like hte Irminsul's top branches, from the base of the tree all the way up to the top. Many of these are long, unfurling structures which bear no resemblance to the date-palms of Sumer, but are a close match to the Germanic Irminsul. Nonetheless, the Assyrian version is a far more complex design than the Germanic Irminsul. It
contains many “excess” structures which are not present on the
Irminsul. And yet all of them can be seen as perhaps symbolic of the
greater superstructure of the World Tree, not merely its trunk or
central pillar. So there are two different ways of looking at this
structure.

Note that the Assyrian "Irminsul" has a ring around the center, perhaps symbolizing Midgard. Aside from the root and crown structures there are also nine pairs of "Irminsul" branches. Though the Assyrians are usually classed as a Semitic ethnic group, a minority of them do have the occasional Indo-European phenotypic throwbacks from the genetic legacy of their ancient ruling-class. The emergence of Indo-European symbols like the Irminsul incorporated into their ancestors' sacred art is not a coincidence. There are many such cases of an Aryan ruling class leaving these cryptic gifts.

Assyrians are a rather diverse bunch, not just in color but also facial structure.

As to whether Germanic heathens in the
early 20th century were aware of the Aryan ruling class of Assyria,
and its spiritual impact on the largely Semitic Assyrian masses, I can
emphatically say that they were; they wrote about it in a number of
books; not only that, but they were enthusiastic hunters of all
things esoteric from Assyria and Babylon, vigorously looking for all
evidence of an Aryan influence, however faint - from the allegedly
Aryan-inspired Sajaha prophecies, to the northern pine-cone symbolism, to the Assyrian Tree of Life
itself, which appears in a simplified form in the cover of Peryt
Shou's Armanist book “The Edda as Keys to the Coming Age”. Shou,
as one can tell from the content of this book, was well aware that
Assyrian elites were also aware, of the concept of Yggdrasil or
Harvisptokm, and that this is what they were illustrating.

But notice that the symbol is far more
complicated and really “overcrowded” in the Assyrian rendition.
This is no accident, though it is not due to the intent of any one
person. As we have seen elsewhere, the Aryan aesthetic of simplicity,
in both esoteric symbolism like Runes, and general architecture and
everyday objects, is contrasting with the excessive ornamentation and
visual crowding of non-Aryan (hunter and herder) cultures. A general
corollary follows: the further an Aryan symbol or archetype strays
from its origins, and the more it is copied and re-copied by
non-Aryan cultures, the more it begins to lose its simple elegance
and starts to conform more to the non-Aryan aesthetics of
hyper-ornamentation and ostentation. This is exactly what happened
when Aryans transmitted an esoteric message into a mainly Semitic
local culture whom they had tried to mold into something less
reactive and impulsive – the symbol became gradually
over-ornamented and its meanings lost in the hands of the ordinary
folk of Assyria. Why then, did this not happen with Europe's
indigenous non-Aryan populations, the brachycephalic Cro-Magnons? Why
did their descendants not seem to even use the Irminsul after the
Aryan contact?

Well, in some ways, they actually might
have – and in some cases it seems to have changed more with them than with the
Assyrians - at least in the core elements of the tree design.

Pictish World Tree. Note the Man-rune resemblance of the top.

The Celts are considered to have been
among the first Indo-European cultures to leave a substantial legacy
in Europe. Most archaeologists consider the “Corded Nordics” and
“Halstatt Nordics” to actually be Celtic ancestors moreso than
Nordic ones. As Celtic culture dispersed and moved west from
“Galicia” in the Ukraine, to Gaul and Iberian Galicia, and
eventually to the British Isles, they mixed more and more with
various Cro-Magnon tribes, until by the time a Pictish cultural
identity took form in what is now Scotland, the “Celts” had taken
on most of the indigenous Cro-Magnon ethnic proportions, and were in
some respects a very different people from the original Celts near
the Bug-Dneister region in Ukraine. Anther thing that seems to have
changed significantly is their conception of the World Tree.

Celtic World Tree - Yorkshire, England

If we accept that Irminsul is a primal
Aryan symbol, or at least has remained close to its primal Aryan
ancestor-symbol, then it is easy to see how largely Cro-Magnon
cultures further from the eastern Urheimat altered it, no less than the Assyrians did. In Slavic lands, the design is rather simpler.

Slavic

To some extent, Cro-Magnon elements in
Nordic culture also embellished the Irminsul beyond its
original form:

Sweden

Sweden

Sweden, 5th century CE

Germany, 8th Century CE - note the resemblance to the Assyrian tree symbol.

But it has appeared in alternate
configurations in yet more lands influenced by an ancient Aryan
migration. Or at the very least, some of these objects appear to be
Irminsuls. Interestingly, in some southern regions the tree symbol is flanked
by two goats, which the Norse associated with Thor. Precisely what
these goats meant to the "Indo-Anatolian" (first-wave Aryan migration) cultures that carved these non-Nordic World
Tree symbols, which resemble certain aspects of Irminsul, is still
not known.

Hittite

Phrygian

CONCLUSION:

For the Germanic, and undoubtedly for
other related cultures, the Irminsul as a symbol conveys a legacy of
hope, improvement, wisdom, knowledge and memory. It is a deep
Ancestral symbol. For my own Southern kin, the Arman-Zal crowning the
head of Arman Vayu-Vata is a heavily guarded esoteric symbol of the
same principle. For the Abgallu and their kin who once founded the
elites of Mesopotamian civilization, it was all of these things,
though the masses of semites who gradually absorbed them ended up
losing much of its meaning. It is, in all contexts, a Tree-symbol,
manifesting organic growth and the gifts of the Sun. In
Armanenschaft, it is represented as a leafy pillar superimposed in
front of a Sonnenrad, symbolizing that Sun and Tree are inseparable,
the Fire of Wisdom is inseparable from the pillar of Arising
consciousness. Consciousness cannot arise blindly or in the dark.

Irminsul or Yggdrasil arises out of the Black Sun, symbolizing Ginnungagap,
and crowned by the white/yellow Sun, seen here as solar-cross.

Additionally, meditation on the
Irminsul helps all Runers, and solar spiritualists of various Northern paths, to remember our condition Arising, Being, and Passing on
towards New Arising. At the current point in the cycle, we seem to be
on its reverse, underbelly of decline – a state often of siege
against faceless adversaries, and our struggle to enhance our
families and our individual selves in the face of deceptive forces
focused on decimating, downsizing and defiling the sacred spirit of
Aryan culture, and the fundamentally holy nature of the
nobility-conscious Immanence. The Irminsul as a symbol lives on, like
the Sonnenrad, revealing its secrets only to those prepared to cast
aside fear and programmed reactiveness, cast aside the propaganda
smears, and accept its true nature, as Odin's Steed, as the pillar of
the universe, and the ultimate repository of the Runes, Mimir's Well,
and all the collected knowledge of countless generations of Armanen,
Vitkar, and Volvar. It is the record of all the noble truths of Asha
and Arya, including those that will force you to confront unpleasant
fact-states and lose convenient delusions.... forever.

This is the message we can draw from
Irminsul. Its energy, when accepted, will make it impossible for a
coercive herder creed to enslave a people to guilt, fear, and
“obedience as debt” to their rule. This is why the Irminsul at
Externsteine, and indeed all other Irminsuls, had to be destroyed –
they were very real symbols of Heathen resistance to the Church, and
of independence from the ever more commoditized and atomized world of
Roman society – a society that nonetheless, for all its abuses, may
seem like a golden age of culture and philosophy compared to our
current entartete state of affairs. But even this cannot erase
the impact of the cosmic Irminsul as a nexus point of our meditation
on the application of Asha and Arya. Its legacy as a
great symbol of Runic spirituality speaks about a brighter future and
a darker past – a new Hoch-Zeit - just as its Germanic nexus-point,
the Externsteine, stands as testament to many past and future Golden
Ages. As a metaphysical consciousness, it has witnessed many rises
and falls, many Kali-Yugas and Satya-Yugas, many Eisenzeits and
Hoch-zeits. It brings a message of spiritual sincerity and honor that
is more important today than ever before. Just as much as the Mjolnir
and the Sonnenrad, the Irminsul should bring an otherworldly warmth
to the hearts of Runers, and indeed all those pursuing the mysteries
of the Odinic way, in both good times and bad.

The Externsteine, aside from its
Irminsul connection, is a place very near and dear to many hearts for
many reasons. Perhaps I may be tempted to speak more about it in the
future.

About Me

For Newcomers

This blog is a research project into rune-lore and rune-magick. Any information here is esoteric history from sources rarely exposed to the light of day, and does not reflect the personal opinions of the author. This blog promotes the revival of Runes and beautiful Indo-European culture. Nothing more, nothing less.